Category: Politics As Usual

Mayor Nutter says city will borrow $50 million to open schools

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

But I think it only postpones the long-term plan:

NOTE: Council President Clarke is holding a news conference momentarily. This post will be updated throughout the day.

Unable to reach an agreement with City Council on Philly’s school-funding crisis, Mayor Nutter today pledged that the city will borrow the $50 million needed for schools to open on time Sept. 9. “I will not risk a catastrophe,” Nutter told reporters in City Hall. “Schools are going to open on time and safely.”

The borrowing will be a general obligation bond. The mayor hopes to pay for it with revenue from the extension of a 1 percentage point city sales-tax increase that was supposed to expire after this year. But he and Council President Darrell Clarke have been sparring over how to handle the sales tax. If Council does not adopt the extension, Nutter said, the borrowing costs will be paid out of the city’s General Fund.

Gee

~ susie

I wonder if they’ll get it this time?

HARRISBURG — For years, local school district officials have tried to get state lawmakers to pass laws reducing the amount of tax dollars paid to charter schools.

Now charter schools — which since 1997 have evolved from independent, isolated institutions into a united, powerful political force — are fighting back. They have launched a coordinated effort to gain up to $150 million annually in additional funding from local school districts in the Lehigh Valley and across the state.

In hopes of doing it, charter schools are bypassing the House, Senate and state Board of Education and going right to Gov. Tom Corbett’s administration in a bid to change the funding formula in their favor.

Tom Terrific

~ susie

tom
‘How big a crook am I?’

Corbett is such a outright thief, liar and scumbag.

How is it that Gov. Corbett and one of his cabinet members overlooked a wee detail – their newly purchased vacation homes – in their financial interest statement filings? Corbett failed to report the 2012 purchase of a $265,000 Hilton Head condo in the annual filing under the governor’s Code of Conduct, according to StateImpact Pennsylvania, a public radio investigative unit focusing on energy and the environment. Michael Krancer, who was until March the secretary of the Department of Environmental Protection, also failed to report the Vermont ski area property he purchased for $1 million last year. The news didn’t sit well with government reform advocates.

“It kind of defies one’s credibility, that ‘whoops I forgot a $265k or million dollar asset,'” said Barry Kauffman, executive director of Common Cause Pennsylvania. “We talking about the ethics law here which helps the public understand intregrity of public officials. If they treat it with a cavalier attitude then the message to the public is laws don’t matter.”

Well, duh. Laws don’t matter, except to the people vulnerable enough to be charged in the first place.

‘Cory Booker is even worse than his critics say’

~ susie

Noam Schieber at the New Republic:

Cory Booker has just won New Jersey’s Democratic Senate primary in a rout, making him an easy favorite to claim the seat this fall. But even stronger than the pundit consensus that Booker will soon be in Washington is the belief that the camera-savvy Twitter celebrity will be a rabble-rouser once he gets there. “He would be a disruptor,” the pros at NBC’s First Read have predicted. “Someone who wants to shake things up.” A vehicle for bringing “street-level experience to a Senate that often seems disembodied from the whole planet,” is how The New York Times endorsement put it. No less an expert than Booker himself has suggested that agitprop will be his preferred mode of discourse, approvingly citing Ted Cruz and Rand Paul as his senatorial role models.

You might be inclined to conclude from this that Booker intends to be the Senate’s liberal conscience—someone who can channel the progressive id from a perch inside Washington, in the same way that Cruz and Paul function as voices of the Tea Party from deep within the capital. Booker is, after all, an inner-city Democrat from a solidly blue state, whose predecessor was a reliably liberal vote. Who better than him to swing for the fences? But, if you happened to conclude this, you’d be way off the mark. What Booker has in mind when he alludes to being an agitator is agitating for the cause of himself.

Cory Booker isn’t the first politician to run for office because he wants recognition and power without any idea of what he wanted it for. In his case, it seems to be that he wants everyone to love him.

Eminent domain for foreclosed houses

~ susie

This idea’s been floating around for a while. Banks don’t like it, of course, and neither do investors. Apparently the only people who like it are the homeowners!

Major cities and some wealthy suburbs may have seen a recovery in the housing market, but between the coasts and in smaller towns nationwide, the flood of underwater homeowners continues.

Take Richmond, Calif., for example, where a staggering 46 percent of homes remain “underwater,” meaning borrowers owe more on the mortgage than the house is worth. These communities have needed a solution for years to prevent successive foreclosure waves and save their neighborhoods from a spiral of blight. And maybe they’ve hit on something.

The answer? Eminent domain.

“The banks aren’t helping us, so we’re stepping into the void and making it happen ourselves,” said Richmond mayor Gayle McLaughlin.

McLaughlin became the first U.S. mayor to take steps to use eminent domain authority — seizing mortgages from the lien holder and selling them back to the homeowner at an affordable rate, giving them the principal reduction that will allow them to stay in their home over the long term.

Other cities have flirted with the controversial strategy, which uses capital funding from a for-profit private investment firm called Mortgage Resolution Partners, but Richmond has actually made purchase offers on 624 loans. The servicers had until yesterday, August 13, to agree to the heavily discounted price, which MRP and Richmond determined through a third-party appraiser. No one has agreed to the terms, and so Mayor McLaughlin will go back to the City Council to get approval to begin the eminent domain process. Other cities are watching, seeing if this can be a national model.

But the mortgage industry has decided to make an example of Richmond, prolonging the fight and preventing relief for borrowers. Investor groups representing the nation’s largest holders of mortgage-backed securities, including government-sponsored entities Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, filed a federal lawsuit last week against Richmond, arguing that the eminent domain scheme is unconstitutional.

Eminent domain seizures of private property must have a public purpose and must offer just compensation to the property owners. The investors allege in their suit that preventing foreclosures is not a valid public purpose, and they say that the compensation they’re being offered is not just.

“Just.” That’s such a relative term, isn’t it? You might argue that people who bought high-risk, high-yield derivatives might as well have thrown that money on the roulette tables in Atlantic City. You might also argue that anyone who bought such high-yield investments should have smelled a rat — but they were too intoxicated by the smell of all that easy money. Oh well!